


Make thy life shudder in thee, and burn afresh

by beyonces_fiancee



Category: Carmilla - J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Genre: Blood, Dreams and Nightmares, F/F, Femslash, Gothic, Poetry, Racebending, Sadomasochism, Story within a Story, Vampires, extremely self-indulgent w/r/t swinburne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-03-30 22:45:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3954682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beyonces_fiancee/pseuds/beyonces_fiancee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>At her urging, I continued shakily, "Thy flower-sweet fingers, good to bruise or bite… as—as honeycomb of the inmost honey-cells…" Carmilla half-sat up to rest her chin on my shoulder; I could feel her feminine figure draped heavily against my back. I felt surrounded by her, engulfed in her. Her fingertips tickled down the nape of my neck, rising a shiver in my blood, and the printed page swam beneath my gaze as she stroked the skin below my collarbone—and lower, and lower.</i> </p><p>Laura discloses to a sympathetic listener the intimate details of her relationship with Carmilla.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make thy life shudder in thee, and burn afresh

**Author's Note:**

> My bosom heaves with tempestuous gratitude for the beta reads provided by the deft-handed [cottonballz_of_death](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cottonballz_of_death) and the poet-hearted [oulfis](http://archiveofourown.org/users/oulfis).

Have you never heard me speak of what truly transpired last winter in my father's castle in Styria, in the high black mountains of Austria? Though the tale as I have told it before is indeed fearsome (as any one who has heard it can inform you), it has suffered something of a diminishment in its narration to a general audience. I dared not speak the whole truth about our strange visitor, her fundamental nature, her disquieting behavior, or the genuine seat of her sympathies, to anyone save my confessor; and even he hardly believed half of what I said, and would not listen to the other half. —But I must say that I feel you to be a sympathetic listener. Of course I could not, and surely would not, have related such a shocking story in company, but now that it is just we two I feel quite, quite safe in revealing the true facts of the case. Just come a little closer to me here and listen. May I rest my hand on your knee, so? You are a dear.

My papa was an officer born in India but a loyalist to the queen, and after the Rebellion we fled to England, and he was presented with his honourable discharge and a generous pension. I was just five years old when we fled; I therefore remember little of my mother country, and less still of my mother, for she died of cholera when I was still an infant in arms. As the cost of life's necessaries was then so much cheaper on the continent than in England, and he had a young daughter to raise, my papa soon became the owner of the schloss at the edge of the great fir forest nearest the small village of D———.

Of Carmilla's arrival and of her sojourn here you have already read; I can only add that when I first saw her, as she was lifted from the sadly overturned carriage in the company of her worried mother, I was dazzled. Even though she had fainted dead away, I was still powerfully impressed with the magnetism of her sweet pallid expression, the daintiness of her figure, and most of all her fall of heavy dark hair, into which I longed to bury my hands, my face, to see and feel the softness of the white nape beneath. As her mother explained the trouble, and my papa listened and inquired, I begged him to allow her to stay with us; and when his acquiescence was granted, I hastened to take her inside and to make her comfortable, this girl of near unearthly beauty. She settled into life at the castle without further ado; and she and I quickly grew close, became the most loyal of friends, for I had never before lived with any one with whom I could share so intimately the trials and joys of my girlhood.

What I could not tell that strange audience, and what I will tell you—I soon fell quite in love with her, almost despite myself; for she was so dear to me, and so radiant and charming in a thousand small ways, that I would not be parted from her. And Carmilla, I found, felt something of the same affection toward me, and perhaps more even than I had expected. She would clutch me to her breast, stroking my hair and gazing rapturously into my face, and a luscious weakness would sink into my blood and leave me helpless in her arms. She would press fevered kisses on my brow, my cheeks, the smooth brown skin of my shoulders, and in an agitated whisper would claim me again and again for her own: "You are my own darling Laura, too precious to let go, too beautiful to be endured… promise me that we will be bosom companions for ever… promise me, do, do…"

The vehemence of her words gave me pause, and yet I grew to desire her caresses and her febrile voice, that prickled my senses as she murmured throatily in my ear and made my eyelids flutter. Time and breaths uncounted I might pass in her arms, knowing nothing of the moon in her course overhead and slowly sinking, the stars turning all unseen by we two. The only stars I cared for were those that glinted in her eyes.

But our soft starlit hours together were cast over by a dim, eerie gloom. More and more often, I awoke in the witching hour to see her kneeling silently by my bedside, her gaze passionately boring into mine; more and more often, she clung so fiercely to me that I grew afraid and hardly dared to oppose her will even when weary and losing sleep; too, reading in the garden I would hear the lightest footsteps and the lightest laughter coming up behind me, as though Carmilla sought to play a trick and cover my eyes for me, and I would swiftly turn and stare—at nothing, last year's dead leaves littering the ground uncrushed, untouched, no footprints in the mold.

I suppose the most alarming occurrence of this sort transpired in late autumn, just before the snows came. As was sometimes her wont, Carmilla was reclining in the weak sunlight on the daybed in her antechamber, reading a book. On the stone wall behind her hung a tapestry representing Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom, a gloomy scene but shot through with embellishments of brightly coloured thread. The fangs and eyes of the asps glittered gold in the late-noon light, and the drip of blood from their bites was embroidered in scarlet.

I had only come to find my shawl, and had not thought to disturb her, but I so rarely saw her around the castle before afternoon; I was curious about what could have lured her out of bed. "What are you reading, dear?"

She glanced up at me, and a slow radiant smile touched her lips; and she lowered her gaze coyly to the printed page. Her thick lashes cast twin shadows on the curves of her cheekbones. "I'm reading poetry. You'll like it; it's so fanciful. Come sit here," she said, and laid her hand next to her body, "and read it with me."

I came to her and sat beside her, and she turned where she lay and curled against me. She held the book in my lap so that both she and I could read at once. Against my lower back I could feel the soft press and release of her belly, as her breath rose and fell. She stroked the page with her finger and looked up at me. "I was reading here, when you came in. Isn't Mr Swinburne charming?"

I could not, quite, take proper heed of what she said. My attention was caught on her index finger as it touched the page, and the sensitive hand, and the fine white wrist; and from the corner of my eye I could see her open mouth quivering with a smile, and the quick accustomed motion of her tongue-tip as it tested the point of her eye-tooth. I made every effort to turn my gaze back to the line of text upon which her fingertip rested; she wanted me to read to her.

" _Ah sweet, and sweet again, and seven times sweet,_ " I read aloud, " _the paces and the pauses of thy feet! Ah, sweeter than all sleep or summer air the fallen fillets fragrant from thine hair!_ "

As I read, I thought of Carmilla, of a sudden behind me, covering my eyes with her hands and laughing musically; of Carmilla, sleeping in the drawing room with one arm thrown up over her eyes to block the light. Of Carmilla, pushing her loose hair back from her brow, gazing up at me with her dark limpid eyes; casting her sweet net about me and drawing me in; settling around me as softly and silently as a silk chemise sinks to the bedroom floor.

" _Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites, stings like an adder, like an arrow smites._ " I struggled, but in vain; I could feel her fingers trailing up the inside of my arm. Her touch was so gentle, it was as though absent. Only the prickling trembling heat of my skin marked the passage of her hand.

" _Yea, though their alien kisses do me wrong, sweeter thy lips than mine with all their song; thy shoulders whiter than a fleece of white—_ " My voice broke off in a gasp. Her lips had closed around my first two fingers, and she was sucking them, looking up at me. The wetness and heat of her mouth was indecent. It felt as though each minute ridge of my fingertips were caressed individually by her tongue. I could not take my eyes away from hers as she gently drew my fingers out; her lips dragged against my skin as though she hated to let me go.

"Are my lips then so sweet, sweet Laura?" she breathed low and teasing.

"You know that they are," I said. "Do not ask me, darling, as if you did not know…"

She was deriving such pleasure from bewildering me. "What verse comes next?" she murmured. "I have quite lost your place. The lines do run together so. Ah—here we are—please, would you keep reading?" And she bent her head down.

I could not do as she asked. Her tongue was pressed around my fingers again, and I could not do anything but sigh. At her urging, I continued shakily, " _Thy flower-sweet fingers, good to bruise or bite… as—as honeycomb of the inmost honey-cells…_ "

Carmilla let my fingers go and half-sat up to rest her chin on my shoulder; I could feel her feminine figure draped heavily against my back. I felt surrounded by her, engulfed in her. Her fingertips tickled down the nape of my neck, rising a shiver in my blood, and the printed page swam beneath my gaze as she stroked the skin below my collarbone—and lower, and lower.

" _With almond-shaped and roseleaf-coloured shells,_ " I almost whimpered, " _and b-blood like purple blossom at the tips quivering…_ "

Her mouth pressed a wet, open, melting kiss onto the skin of my throat. My eyes fluttered closed and I fell back against her. She was gently insinuating her fingers beneath the neckline of my dress, and kissing, kissing, sucking at the place below the corner of my jaw. I must be unreservedly honest with you, and tell you this: when she touched me in such a fashion, she plucked at every fibre of my being until my body sang like a harp under her hands.

Her voice was low and close to my ear as she read the next line. " _And pain made perfect in thy lips, for my sake, when I hurt thee… O that I durst crush thee out of life with love, and die; die of thy pain and my delight, and be mixed with thy blood and molten into thee!_ " And as she spoke, her sharp nails scratched across the soft underside of my breast, leaving stinging tracks in their wake.

I cried aloud at the pain and clutched her hand, her touch ghost-light again as it traced up my breastbone. She cooed: "Perfect in thy perfect lips…" And her hot tongue squirmed against the shell of my ear until I moaned, and her nails raked my breast until I wailed. I was dizzied with sensation as she tormented me thus again and again, could hardly tell one from the other, squeezed and rocking in the circle of her arms—until she started and sat up at some sound from without the room. In this brief reprieve from her attentions, I was able to collect myself.

"Darling," I said, pulling my dress up from its disarray, "do you—do you think this is quite proper for us to do?"

Carmilla laughed aloud. "As though you or I care about propriety!"

"No, not quite so…" I said, hesitating. "But my papa is resolute that I receive a proper English upbringing, that I might go into society and not be ashamed. And if I were to disregard what is fitting for an English lady, I should feel as though his efforts to raise me were in vain…"

She nearly scoffed at this suggestion, but I pressed on. You understand, of course, the way that an idea can sometimes take hold of one, and refuse to be shaken loose. A lock of her hair fell from behind her ear, and she tucked it absently back with a smile at me.

"And I sometimes feel," I said, "that, perhaps—perhaps one should not behave so with someone one loves? It almost shocks me, the things you say, the way you look at me, touch me… It is as if you were my lover; but lovers do not hurt one another, do they?"

She laid her hand on my knee, then, and gazed into my eyes with ardent longing. "You believe that because I hurt you, I am not then in love with you? Look! you can see how I love you—see how my heart beats, and only for the angel to whom it belongs—only for Laura." With my hand clasped in both of hers, she pressed it to her lips, then to her heart. She seemed frantic to prove herself to me, and indeed I could feel her heart pounding as though it would start out of her chest.

"But how can you give me your heart, dear?" I said. I felt a lump coming in my throat. "I hold you my dearest friend, but friends, whether cruel or kind, cannot dally together playing girlish games for ever." She seemed appalled at this idea, and I hastened to elaborate, hardly believing my own words as I spoke them. "What of… what of your husband, when he is lucky enough to find you? You cannot tell me that you will prefer me over the man you will marry."

Her eyes had a hungry, miserable gleam. "I have been in love with no one, nor ever shall," she said, "unless it should be with you."

How to react to such an open declaration, I did not know. Truly, I loved her too, and had secreted my feeling for her these several months, but it was my very love that frightened me. I was afraid of my own unquestioning acceptance, my own surrender, to the demands she made of me and the pain she gave me and anything else she wished of me. Who could say what I would not do for Carmilla, enthralled as I was, or what I would not give to her?

She could see the fear and hesitation in my eyes and read it on my lips, and it made her furious. She rose from her seat and dashed my hand down onto the daybed, hot tears welling in her eyes. "Very well, then," she cried, "if you will not love me as I love you, I would rather you die." And despite my protests, she rushed from the room.

From that day forward, my lot was not one of peace. Sleeping in my bed I was racked night after night by dreams. I dreamt I was pursued by a black cat big as a pony with horrible snarling mouth and bared fangs; I dreamt I was bound on a great iron table and tortured by inches, my strength and youth draining from me as I keened and struggled; I dreamt I, small as a mouse, was hopelessly lost in a forest of tall snowy pines as the pale sun set, and growing bone-colder and blue-slower with every needle-crunching step. After every dream I would jerk awake, sweating and panting, and, as I realized each horrible scene before me was not life but a nightmare, breathe a sigh of relief; then, as my chest ceased to heave with fear and began regularly if not peacefully to rise and fall, I would drift off to sleep. And another dream would come. For nine nights, I thus lost the sleep that refreshed me. Dark circles grew darker under my eyes, and I wandered through the schloss in a daze, only knowing whether I was sleeping or waking by the identity of the companion constantly at my side. If waking, Carmilla was ever with me, sympathetically stroking my weary head and murmuring sweet words and fancies to make me laugh; if sleeping, my only companion was my fear, that visited me in a thousand shapes and night after night robbed me of peace and happiness.

The dream on the ninth night was worst. Despite my utter exhaustion, I slept uneasily, the little sleep I could coax from myself haunted by stalking shadows just past the corner of my eye. I dreamed then of kissing my own Carmilla, her hair spilling in shining curls over my face and cloaking me in her irresistible fragrance, her sweetly soft body pressed against mine with all the passion of love. Almost I could not breathe, with the adoration in which I held her. As we kissed and embraced, of a sudden she reached one hand behind her back and drew a knife. I, hardly comprehending, smiled up at her as she struck. Even as the knife entered just below my breast and pierced my heart I smiled, even as the blood drowned her hands I smiled and kissed her snarling face. I lay beneath her, bleeding, as she rose above me, and seemed to keep rising, and grew taller and taller and leaner and leaner, until she was no longer her own sweet self but a monstrous black-maned apparition clothed in tattered black velvet and streaked with smears of my blood. Most dreadful of all, my dream-self did not cower from this horror and pain but instead reached for her with weak arms and called out to her in a voice thick with lust. The ghoul that was once my own dream-Carmilla reached down to me, her growl softening to a croon, and cradled my grey face in her bony long-clawed hands and pressed her clammy half-exposed flesh against my bleeding body, intimate just as before. Her icy lips touched my cheek, traveling by kisses toward my own lips now purple-pale, and I swooned. She kissed the corner of my mouth with infinite tenderness, and as her lips clotted with blood and deathly cold touched mine, my mouth opened against hers and in slithered a sinuous starving snake—

I awoke screaming, clawing at my mouth, jerking from side to side in the sweat-soaked cocoon of my bedclothes. Strands of hair were stuck to my forehead, my throat was raw and my heart battering in my chest until it hurt me. I could hear the wind outside howling through the lashing pines, and dashing itself in vain against the weighty stones of the castle. But within the walls all was silent as a tomb. I had just rolled over, still a-tremble, to try again to sleep, when I heard a sound that filled me with a curious dread. Carmilla's footsteps, out in the corridor, tripping lightly as a phantom over the thick carpet. And yet my pulse grew rapid, thinking of her approach; and of the glance with which she might trap me as a snake traps a bird, and know the secrets of my dreaming thoughts, and gaze even into the damnation of my soul.

The footsteps approached my chamber and stopped just outside the locked door. The hangings around my bed muffled all noise within the room; I could not hear her breathing. My ears strained and my eyes stared but registered nothing. I lay still as death in the pitch darkness, my skin prickling, a tremor in my belly. From the silence, a voice fluttered out.

"Open your curtains to me and let me embrace you."

She spoke in a queer low murmur that barely passed the thick velvet hangings, but every word struck my sensitive ear as though she were speaking aloud. I could not pretend at not having heard her. Despite my apprehension, I sat up and pushed back the curtain to reveal her little face and her small tense body glowing in white night-clothes in the light of her candle. Almost as I did so, she pushed her way inside, clambering swiftly over me to curl at my side and clasp me in her arms. In the time it takes me to say it she had already done it. I had been warm and snug beneath my coverlet, but that was nothing compared to the fiery heat that radiated from her body through her shift and filled the entire bed.

"I could hardly sleep for thinking of you, dear," she whispered into my ear. Indeed, as you have just heard, I could hardly sleep for thinking of her too; though my thoughts were of a different nature than she intended by her remark. But I could make no reply, for almost before she finished speaking, I was swept up in the passion of her embrace. She seemed ravenous tonight, and hardly relented in the kisses she pressed on every inch of me she could reach. The buttons on my nightgown were slipped open one after the other by her seeking fingers, and her mouth sought my exposed flesh to suck and bite, before returning to my lips for another loving embrace. And again the hot languor crept through my veins—my will half against it and half in panting favor—and I sighed against her mouth. My heart, still rattling like a snare-drum from that nightmare, now sped to another rhythm: the mood and timbre of her kisses, and the volatile pressure of her hand on my throat.

She crushed my body to her, gloating over my every small sign of pleasure. I hardly find it proper to speak these words, but even as I gasped for breath in her tight embrace and twisted against the pain of her teeth sinking sharp into my soft flesh, I found myself seduced by what should have repulsed me. You may not believe that I so soon forgot her strangeness, her dreadful caprices, and the foreboding encounter on the daybed; but when Carmilla held me so, I was moved by a power stronger than I can tell. I felt that I would rather have her, with all her rages and fancies, than heaven itself.

And she, it seemed, would rather have me. So enraptured was I by her cruel touch, despite my initial reservation, that when she ceased to kiss me and began to lick long wet stripes down my belly, I only stroked my hands fervently through her hair, and gasped when she mercilessly pinched the tight nub of my nipple between her nails. At last her warm lips closed over my sex, shielded from her depredation only by a scrap of lace, and a huff of hot damp breath on that tender spot flooded me with desire. I let out half a moan then hastily muffled the over-loud sound, and she laughed looking up at me from where she knelt.

"You have no need for shyness, darling Laura, we two are alone here."

She rolled her thumb in slow circles, delicately pressing the fabric of my undergarment against my entrance, and I shuddered. I could feel wetness soaking through the lace as though I were salivating to welcome her covetous fingers. She felt it too, and doubtless saw all, situated as she was just inches from my sex. "Ah! then you _do_ love me, darling…"

With nimble fingers she grabbed at the gusset of my undergarment and, in two swift motions, jerked it down to my knees and then almost to my ankles. A tiny shriek escaped me at being so suddenly exposed and, without thinking of the consequences, I twisted my tangled legs away from her and covered my nakedness with my hands. This small defiance provoked her into uttering a growl that quite frightened me (and yet, I must confess, it sent all through my blood an ecstatic shiver).

"If you do not move your hands away from your sweet self," said Carmilla, her voice low and choked with emotion, "I will think you do not care for me to touch you."

"No—no, darling—" I drew my hands hesitating up to my chest. "Only you did startle me so…"

"As you love me, then—let me look at you, and touch you, so." And she laid her hand lightly, so lightly, on the low curve of my belly. I shivered at her caress. The anticipation mounted in my heart to a higher and higher pitch, so that every glance and touch she bestowed upon me seemed to spit and crackle with electricity. "I feel—" she continued, "I feel, when I see you, as though I almost want to tear you apart. You draw out in me such an affliction, such a fever of love for you… Come here, now; and let me look at you."

I sighed at the commanding tone of her voice, and resisting no further flung my hands up above my head. At once Carmilla forced my legs apart and held them there, her strong little fingers pressing into the soft backs of my thighs, and there paused a moment. She was evidently pleased by my submission to her touch. I could feel my breathing grow quick and shallow under her rapacious gaze; the cool air where it brushed against my heated sex was torturous. The nightgown I wore was laid open from breastbone to toes and rumpled underneath me where Carmilla had shoved it aside. She smiled with an air that seemed to me malicious, relishing the way I trembled and arched against the press of her hands, as I whimpered for her touch in a more vital spot.

"Please, Carmilla," I said, "don't be cruel. Come here and kiss me, or touch me as you like, or anything you will with me; but when you grin at me like that, I can hardly bear it."

"Cruel?" said she, with another smile. "Am I cruel to you, dear? Don't you think I have good reason? You must recall the verse you read to me. _Love makes all that love him well as wise as heaven and crueller than hell…_ " And she leaned just a little forward and began to kiss the pink sole of my right foot.

"My sweet Laura," she breathed, "I am stricken so with love that I cannot help being cruel. And how can I prevent myself from loving you? All your little flirtations—" as she pressed little nips against the skin down my calf, "your charming manner—" as she kissed with wet open mouth the hollow of my knee where the skin is sensitive, "the way in which you regard me when we are alone—" as she wetly ran her tongue in one breathtaking stripe from knee just to soft dark thigh-crease and (mercy!) no further, "there is nothing about you that is not utterly adorable."

As Carmilla spoke to me and touched me thus, she lightly toyed with slippery fingertips at the aching core of my being, and I whined with every stroke.

"I thought that you did not love me, you spoke to me so dreadfully when I kissed you last week, and my heart was nearly broken," she murmured, looking up at me as she leaned her cheek against my thigh, her eyes brimming with hurt, her fingers flirting with me unmercifully. "And to see you draw away from me, truly, it wounded me; it was almost more than I could abide."

"I _am_ sorry, dear, of course I did not mean it," I said, my breast heaving. But she only said like a sigh something that I could not understand, and with one last little stroke removed her hand, despite the roll of my hips that begged her to stay. I blush to tell you that when she took her hand away, I could only tear my gaze from her slyly smiling face to stare at her glistening fingers. She spread her fingertips to watch the slick pearlescence drawn into a heavy strand between them, then brought her wet hand to her mouth and sucked the wetness off. The muscles in my belly jumped.

"Please, do not leave me so," I begged, longing to arch my hips up toward her, or to dare to reach up and with both hands draw down toward me her feline-smiling face. I could feel the caress of her moist warm breath and the tickle of her long lashes against my inner thigh. "Oh, please, as you love me, do not leave me s— _ah_ —!"

Carmilla had lowered her mouth to my sex and with the tenderest touch of her lips began to suck gently at the aching bud whence all my fever and desire blossomed. A wave of pleasure crested and broke within me, and I moaned aloud and opened to her slick pressing tongue.

Images, phrases, ideas whirled through my thoughts to the pulse of her tongue's stripe and swirl against me. I seemed to hear Carmilla's voice, reading aloud to me as she often did, smirking a little as though she knew how powerful was the sound of her voice, how weak for her it made me; but we had never finished reading this poem, she and I: _"Ah, that my mouth for Muses’ milk were fed on the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds had bled! ...That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet, thy body were abolished and consumed, and in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!"_ To be eaten and entombed—to be crushed in the embrace of her arms, to be drawn out in a fine keening thread between her two hands, to be licked up in rivulets by her eager tongue and swallowed whole into her wet working mouth—I could not at that moment imagine any greater delight, any more perfect ecstasy.

Her nails were biting into the meat of my thigh, at first gently at the soft crease and swell, but gradually as hard as a stab. I thrashed and sobbed at her hands, submerged in a contradiction of feeling. The final stroke fell when the wet, strong rhythm of her tongue was replaced by her teeth, closing onto my most intimate spot and worrying lightly. My paroxysm quickly overcame me; tautening, clenching, agonizing frustration gave way like a snapped cord and a reverberation of stunning sweetness washed out all else.

I fell back panting, my thoughts all one glowing shuddering emptiness. Carmilla was crawling up my body to meet me, and I seized her up and pressed her to my breast, overcome with a morbid and fevered love. I ached to feel her shudder with desire as I had, but I did not know how to cause in her the same tumultuous feeling that she had given me. I kissed her mouth and cheeks and chin, sucking the juice from her swollen lips as she wriggled against me and purred into my mouth, and finally I gasped in her ear:

"Please, darling, show me what you did to me, that I might do the same…!"

Again Carmilla smiled like a cat, and rubbed against me as though at her leisure, but murmured only, "Give me your hand." As I kissed at the darling mole on her throat, she took my arm from around her and thereby my hand, and drew it down toward the place between her legs where she knelt. Her white nightgown she dragged up at the same time, and I stroked my other hand eagerly up the curve of her thigh and her waist as her white skin was revealed. With just my fingertips, I pressed a little way into the folds of her sex, feeling there with a gentle touch the wetness which was still so new to me, but her grip was strong around my wrist and pulling me inexorably inward. I entered her with three fingers to the knuckle, and we both moaned to feel the thrust sink home.

She spoke into my shoulder, breathless: "Can you feel me here, beloved? See, you can feel my heart beat even here for you…" And so I could, stretched around my fingers: the hot tremble of her soaked heart. I wanted to scream aloud with the pleasure of feeling a part of myself inside her—of feeling her squeeze me like a wet silk corset—but Carmilla saw the expression on my face and clapped her hand over my mouth, so that I had to content myself with thrusting a little deeper, and driving my knee against the back of my hand, and crying out needy and muffled into her palm.

My legs trembled with exertion as she began to ride my hand against my thigh. To my ears and mine alone she yielded up the sweetest, oh, the sweetest sounds, the most voluptuous sighs and moans, and with such fire in her throbbing contralto that it made me groan and arch against her anew. Darling thing, she shifted her leg forward to meet me, and her hand gripped my throat with dizzying pressure. With that inescapable rocking force against my flushed and dripping sensitivity, and that hand claiming me as hers, body and soul, I felt the cresting wave within me boil forward again toward breaking. She and I moved together, faster, frantic, desperate.

"I love you so, that I shall die of love," came Carmilla's voice hot against my ear. She was riding me like she would a stubborn mare, urging me on by the squeezing of her thighs and the powerful grind of her hips. "Tell me you love me, dearest, tell me!"

"I love you, I love you—" My mouth stumbled on the words, so quickly did they spill forth. "I love you, in God's name I would die for you!" 

Her eyes glowed strangely with the sudden look she shot me, and she kissed my face with fierce kisses that were half bites. "Swear not by God, darling—by the devil too—and by the mouth of hell—"

"I swear by all these I love you," I gasped, my thighs clenching around hers, my belly dripping with sweat, all my soul centered and pounding at the place where my fingers hooked into her and my slick sex rubbed almost against hers, her fingers tangled now in my hair and pulling my head to one side to expose the skin of my neck, "a thousand times I love you—"

"Swear you would die for me!" She seemed mad, and I was mad too. The flames were roaring up within me, licking up and swelling higher, my face dark-flushed, my heart pounding like a prisoner against the bars of her cage.

"I swear it, I swear—" An unholy force had seized me and I was shaken to and fro like a rabbit in the jaws of a hound. I could feel her kisses smearing down my throat toward my breast. "I would die for you, my —dearest, my only, please—please—"

And at one and the same moment, I felt the surge of my paroxysm breaking over me, consuming me sweet and hot; and I felt a searing pain pierce my breast, as though a thorn had lodged deep in my heart. Never before or since have I felt such pain. The agony overwhelmed me and mingled with the sweetness of the pleasure until I swooned. My body was wracked with burning, clutched in a mortal embrace, and I felt as though my soul were being sucked out, spurt by throbbing spurt. I could still feel Carmilla's caress against my ashen cheek and the weight of her body pressed against mine, and as the world spun and faded to black before my eyes, I thought I heard her voice crooning, "All thy beauty sickens me with love… my own darling Laura…" And I knew no more.

I lay in bed in a dead faint for seven days and nights, they told me; not the servants, nor my father, nor any of the doctors he called could rouse me from my trance. The snow was falling on the castle and the surrounding district, and the search for Carmilla was hamstrung by the loss of any tracks; although, as I think back on the curious coincidences that surrounded her, I do not believe they would have been able to find Carmilla by any tracks at all, whatever the weather. Too, the doctors told me something else: that though unresponsive to any word or sign from the people crowded at my bedside, my face was deformed in a rictus of pain, my mouth spoke words in a language that no-one understood, and I streamed with sweat and burned to the touch as though in the grip of a deathly fever. Perhaps I was in a fever, by the wounds that had festered, but once seven days and nights had past I awoke at last from the faint and healed with remarkable speed; look, you can see here when I fold back my dress for you; the scars are hardly more than two small white marks. You can touch them if you like. And all I have to remember her by are these marks, for I never saw her again.

Thank you for inquiring, dear; I do feel a bit queer, the air seems terribly warm and close. I declare I feel quite faint. Oh, you are so sweet to worry about my health. I should kiss you for being such a darling. Perhaps I should feel better if I put my hand on your beating heart, so, and laid my head upon your breast…?

**Author's Note:**

> The verses that Carmilla and Laura moon over are taken from Charles Algernon Swinburne's poem "Anactoria," published in 1865. It can be found in full [here](http://www.telelib.com/authors/S/SwinburneAlgernonCharles/verse/p1/anactoria.html).


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